While the IRA’s crusade to drive out the ‘invader’ maintained a desultory existence, it would, in 1962, call the whole thing off and blame its failure on ‘the attitude of the general public whose minds have been deliberately distracted from the supreme issue facing the Irish people – the unity and freedom of Ireland’.51 In this at least the IRA showed some glimmer of realism: the Irish people were indeed in a state of long-term distraction, radically uncertain about how to define themselves.
